Category: Gaming

DAW post: the little guys

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s Developer Appreciation Week! If you don’t know what that is, read up about it on ScaryBooster’s blog (he invented it, after all!)

I like to think I always appreciate developers but maybe that’s just in my own head. I certainly do my fair share of bitching about games.

Back in olden times when I wrote for a gaming magazine I met a lot of game developers. In those days only the biggest companies had PR flacks. More often than not you’d sit down with a few members of the team and a producer and talk about their next big thing.

I can’t remember ever meeting a developer who wasn’t super-excited about their product. Now I was press so maybe the grumpy devs were all locked in a closet, but from my point of view visiting a company meant hanging out with a bunch of people who were overflowing with energy and optimism and a love of gaming. I’d come out of those meetings bursting with energy. So much fun.

But that was long ago and now it’s rare that I get to meet game developers. The closest I come is rubbing shoulders with them at PAX East. No, I didn’t talk to Cliff Bleszinski at PAX (my one and only meeting with him was at the very first E3 when he and a few other teen-aged guys were running around with a laptop trying to get journalists to look at some shooter they were building…it was called Unreal or something like that) or anyone from SW:TOR or Battlefield 3.

I talked to, or at least hovered around, the little guys. So my DAW post is going to be about the smaller developers. I’m constantly impressed at how devoted these folks are to making their games. They’re always on a strict budget, trying to figure out how to get published (or whether to self-publish) and how to handle PR & Marketing and pay the rent and do the taxes…while they’re also slaving away on a game.

I love the timing of DAW because it comes so soon after PAX East, and both years I’ve come out of the show enthused about the smaller and indie devs. Y’know, those “garage developers” that Nintendo doesn’t give a fig about. Stupid Nintendo. Really stupid.

So let’s name some names. There’s Fire Hose Games (Slam Bolt Scrappers) and Robot Entertainment (Orcs Must Die) and Demiurge (Shoot Many Robots) and Hothead Games (Swarm) and Polytron (Fez) and Owlchemy Labs (Smuggle Truck). These guys were all showing their games at PAX and I plan to buy and play them all (I’ve already bought Slam Bolt Scrappers and Swarm).

There were more there and of course there’s are a ton of small and indie developers who didn’t go to PAX. Blendo Games (Atom Zombie Smasher) is another small developer who I’ve recently supported via my gaming addiciton.

One company I have to single out is Dusty Monk’s Windstorm Studios. Their first game doesn’t have a (public) title yet, but what’s incredible here is Dusty’s transparency. Those of us who follow him on Twitter really get an inside peek at the day-to-day life of an indie developer. You are your only boss and it’s clear that you have to have a lot of inner strength to beat out some code when you’d rather be playing Rift like everyone else is.

I’m positive I wouldn’t have the willpower to do it and I’m kind of awed that all these companies have small teams that have to really behave as TEAMS with everyone pulling their weight and then some. These people bust their asses to produce games for us to play and let’s face it…very few of them are getting rich doing it. They make games because they love games. If they didn’t love games they could make a lot more money working on accounting systems or something.

I salute all of you ladies and gentlemen who’re working in teams small enough that there’s no hiding from the pressure or riding on another person’t coattails. Everyone has to give 110% every day in order to get your games to the market.

Your games are fresh and fun and awesome. Please keep up the good work, and I’ll keep buying them!

One last item: a special salute of admiration goes out to Werit, who is building a game by himself and seems to really be sticking to it. He is as indie as indie can be! I look forward to the day when he launches Stellar Fortune!

Rift: Guess I’m a public group convert

Posted on by Nimgimli

As mentioned on Twitter, going to PAX East has dampened my enthusiasm for MMOs a bit. Or more accurately, it has enhanced my enthusiasm for other games; I saw so many non-MMOs that I’m interested in playing that it makes dedicating myself to an MMO seem constricting. Since PAX East I’ve purchased Slam Bolt Scrappers (PS3), Atomic Zombie Smasher (PC), Arthur: The Role-Playing Game (PC but not new…it was on Impulse for $2.99 last weekend) and snagged the demo of Dungeons (PC). Whew!

So on top of going back to The Witcher (based on everyone having fun with DA2… I want to finish The Witcher so I can then go back to DA:O and Awakening and finally catch up and play DA2) I haven’t put a lot of time into MMOs recently.

But I did get some time into Rift this past weekend and, as usual, got caught up in events beyond those I’d planned when I logged in, having a ton of fun in the process.

But one thing I did encounter which irked me a tad. I ran into a non-public group while trying to close a rift. There I was, ready to beat back the denizens of the plane of earth. It was going slowly since I was alone. Then I spotted help on the horizon. Huzzah! I went to click the Public Group button and it wasn’t there.

Bwa? Huh?

Turns out it was a private group consisting of members from a guild. They got to work sealing the rift. There wasn’t much I could do buy lurk behind them and contribute DPS (was playing a Rogue DPS build). If I tagged a mob and got aggro they’d ignore me, working as a team to kill the mobs they’d tagged. Generally this resulted in my death, which then allowed them to tag the mob I’d been fighting and get credit for the kill. I’m not saying they were doing this maliciously but when you’re in a group you tend to only pay attention to other members of your group.

So like a hyena I skulked around the edges of the party, sniping at mobs they’d already tagged. Aside from making me feel like a leech it wasn’t really that bad. I still got decent rewards and stuff, so I’m not really complaining so much as marveling at the fact that I missed that Public Group button, since I wasn’t really a fan of the system when it was first introduced.

But now I find I miss it when it isn’t there. I guess I’ve been converted.

More on Rift hacking

Posted on by Nimgimli

Saw this post on RiftJunkies:

RIFT Junkies NOT The Source of Account Hacks

Despite the odd title (I guess people were accusing them?) they link to a thread in the official forums where someone claimed they’d found an exploit with the login system of Rift that let him log into a friend’s account without having his password:

Here’s a link to the post. It’s a huge thread so I’ll summarize. The person then said he’d been in contact with Trion and later, that a fix was incoming.

Assistant Community Manager Elrar responded in that thread:

All,

We have some things in the works right now and have been passing on your feedback, concerns, and thoughts throughout the day (no matter how radical or unlikely).

Sharing sensitive information about our actions (no matter how broad) naturally also informs those carrying out these attacks. This puts us in a tight spot with how much information we can provide, and the questions we can answer.

Apologies we can’t be more forthcoming at this time, but we appreciate your understanding – its always our goal to ensure you can play and enjoy the game securely, and unfettered.

Thanks everyone,

After this, the original poster referred non-believers to this thread which is about an emergency server restart having to do with Account Security (this was on the 18th).

Later still, the original post was back with, among other things, this to say:

Last but certainly not least, I must also sing the praises to Trion. Most companies do their level best to hide critical security issue sand sneak in fixes. Trion responded to the news by contacting me within the hour, discussing the details in detail, and responding within minutes of getting info that they verified the issue and were expediting a solution. A couple hours later, everyone gets to try out Coin Lock and the hole is plugged with steel-reinforced concrete under twelve feet of kevlar policed by sharks with frickin’ lasers on their frickin’ heads.

And later:
Got word back from Steve Chamberlin, the development lead for Rift. This hole is sealed.

That’s not everything but those seem to be the salient points.

It sounds like the hacks were more or less random. You could log into your account and then log into some other random account. If you had a piece of info (as yet unspecified but apparently not email or password) you could target a specific account, but it sounds like most using this exploit were just jumping into whatever account was randomly exposed to them.

So we’ll see. Hopefully things will be better now.

[Updates:
Zam has an interview with the user who discovered the exploit.
Scott Hartsman’s post about the situation.
]

Rift and hacked accounts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Disclaimer: I am not a security expert.

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about folks getting their Rift accounts hacked. Most often the #1 question is “How did this happen?” People go crazy examining their systems for key loggers or other malware that might be delivering their credentials to some hacker.

I have my own theory on what’s going on. Part of it is Trion’s fault, part of it is the internet’s fault. I don’t think we’re seeing a massive key logger issue here; at least not one on our home computers. That’s assuming the problem is as extensive as the community seems to think it is.

I think we’re seeing an organized, brute force hacking attempt across a multitude of accounts. If you’ve never read about rainbow hash cracking, now might be a good time to do so. Note the first line in that post: The multi-platform password cracker Ophcrack is incredibly fast. How fast? It can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423” in 160 seconds. and the post is from 2007; you can imagine how much faster these cracking software packages work today.

[Update] Glad I put the disclaimer about not being a security expert in there. According to a friend on Twitter (who I won’t credit just so as not to put him in the spotlight) in order to use these rainbow tables, the hackers would first need to have access to Trion’s database of hashed (encrypted) passwords. Or, of course, a dump of any other database of passwords where you used the same password. So I may be off-base in my whole theory. [End Update]

So what can you do? Honestly, not very much. I think Trion stumbled when they limited password length to 16 characters. Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood promotes the idea of pass phrases. So instead of “!ah84&nah3” as a password (which can be cracked pretty quickly using rainbow tables) your password might be “IreallyLove_Rift_(because)all(!)myhawtfriendsplay!” My understanding is (again, not a security expert) that a password that long is going to be hard to crack even with rainbow tables, because the size of the table it would require would be so freaking huge. There’s a little bit of “When a bear is chasing you, you only need to be faster than your friends” thing going on. A lengthy password takes you out of the “low hanging fruit” demographic.

For me, that long passphrase is also easier to remember and faster to type than !ah84&nah3, but maybe I’m just weird.

Anyway the point is moot since Trion limits us to 16 character passwords.

I’m also not sure about having to use your game login credentials to log into the forums and website. How many people log into the forums from public Wifi at a coffee shop or something? Since the site and forums use https:// to log in, they *should* be secure but I still feel uneasy about that.

Anyway, the good news is… well, there isn’t really any good news, except that if you get hacked don’t pull your hair out examining and re-examining your system looking for key loggers.

The best you can do at this point is using all 16 characters of your password and definitely mix in punctuation. But I suspect that the gold farming companies that are doing all this hacking are using rainbow tables that cover punctuation. Also make sure you’re using a unique password for Rift, not one you use on other sites.

Hopefully the Coin Lock feature will be the first step in putting an end to this outbreak of hacking (but I suspect the hackers will quickly start spoofing IP addresses to get around it), and I’m looking forward to Trion’s future anti-hacking techniques like authorization via emails/sms or smartphone authenticators.

Last thought: If you’re buying gold, you’re part of the problem. Remember that the gold you’re buying most likely originated from a hacked account. By creating demand, you’re encouraging hacking.

Is 38 Studios going Free to Play?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought for sure someone was going to run with this but I haven’t seen anything yet so wanted to throw this out there.

Note: I’m using the common phrase “Free to Play” but we all know these games aren’t really free. Non-subscription based is more accurate but less catchy.

At PAX last weekend we went to MMORPG.com’s “The Future of Online Gaming” panel. Great session, by the way.

One of the questions asked was about the trend towards Free to Play. Turbine’s Craig Alexander was the obvious person to answer the question and he spoke positively about how well DDO Online and LOTRO have been doing since going Free to Play. 38 Studios’ Curt Schilling was also on the panel, sitting right next to Alexander, and he was nodding along and enthusiastically supporting Alexander in sharing the benefits of a Free to Play model.

I wasn’t there as a blogger, just a gamer, so I wasn’t taking notes or anything, and so I can’t provide quotes, but coming out of the show Jeremy (@_JWGoodson) speculated that Schilling’s comments were telling and that they may have tipped us off to 38 Studios’ plans to forgo the subscription model and going straight to a Free to Play model when Copernicus finally launches.

Sheer speculation at this point, but I thought it was interesting enough to share, but too long for tweeting. 🙂

PAX East 2011, Day 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Ah PAX 2011, I hardly knew ye and now you are gone… so sad.

We had a pretty short PAX day today, to be honest. The only panel we were really interested in was at 3 PM, but we had to be back home in time to pick up Lola from the Puppy Hotel by 6 and I was worried about cutting it so close (one good traffic snarl and she’d be stuck there for another night).

So we just wandered around the exhibit hall one last time. Angela made it a game to snag as much swag as possible today, so that was fun. I finally found Guild Wars 2 and watched some of that being played.

Overall seeing the “big games” at PAX wasn’t a huge deal for me. These games get so much coverage online, and I know I’m going to wind up playing them all anyway, so it’s nice to see them, get an idea of what they’re like, but I don’t hover much (plus those booths are always mega crowded).

I enjoy looking at all the rest. For instance I’m a huge hack & slash action-rpg fan so I’m stoked about LOTR: War in the North (developed by Snowblind Studios who are great at this kind of game, and published by WB) and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge by Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment (published by Bethesda).

FireFall still looks awesome but it’s a team-based shooter and sadly I don’t really do those. Unless they add bots. 🙂

Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment…think I mentioned this already…is a day 1 purchase. Oh and both Child of Eden and The Michael Jackson Experience may threaten us with actually using the Kinect. (CoE for both of us, MJE for Angela).

Anyway, we were pretty tired (hey PAX, next year don’t have the show on Daylight Savings Time weekend!) and anxious to get home so we left early. By the time I was unloading the car I was kinda wishing we were still there. 🙂 Now I have post-PAX melancholy. It didn’t help that I opened the mailbox to find claim forms for my mother’s life insurance policy and emails in my inbox from family members about how we’re going to settle her estate.

Yeah, back to real life. In my head I was anxious to leave so I could come home and play games, but in practice I just came back to catching up. Oh well.

I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, buy a $250 set of headphones for my PS3. Set those up and wow do they sound great but..what was I thinking? They’re wireless RF for audio and bluetooth for voice, very comfortable and all that. But I tell you, a few days living in a conference environment and money starts to lose it’s value. (Two nights in the Westin Hotel, at their $179/night rate, managed to cost just about $500 once they added parking, internet, and a skillion taxes, and there’s nowhere near the center with cheap food, really.)

Oh well it’s once a year and now the “Pax credit card” goes in a drawer until next year, though I’ll be paying off the hotel and those silly headphones well into the summer!!

I’m already looking forward to next year, but between now and then I’m really looking forward to keeping in contact with all the folks I met via twitter and hopefully in-game.

PAX East 2011 gets a big thumbs up from us!

PAX East 2011, Day 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

The sun came out in Boston this morning, both literally and figuratively.

All of my frustrations from yesterday kind of melted away. I found out that the lines I was bitching about yesterday were only really bad for 1 particular theater, and that was because the people running the convention center wouldn’t let the line stretch where the event planners had intended it (along an elevated section of hallway). So they had to really cram people in to make up for the lost space.

Other lines were long, but more relaxed. A good thing, though in the end I only went to one panel but it was a good one; a Q&A with a group of MMO big-wigs. At 1:30 in the morning I’m not even going to try to remember everyone’s name, but 38 Studios, Turbine, Trion, Bioware, ArenaNet and other MMO dev companies were represented. Most of the panel was Q&A and there were some pretty good questions and lots of good discussion among the panelists.

The show floor was *packed* today but having got over our travel-induced grumpiness, Angela (@g33kg0dd3ss) and I dove right in. We saw a lot of interesting games; I’m now looking forward to Dungeons from Calypso, Swarm from Hothead Games, Smuggler Truck (??) an iPhone game, Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment, DragonNest from Nexon, Faxion (the last two being free-to-play MMOs) and Slam Bolt Scrappers from Firehose Games.

Yeah, there were a lot of “big name” games there too but their booths were still a bit too crowded for me to deal with. Specifically I didn’t play SW:TOR or Guild Wars 2. But in the end that didn’t matter.

In the evening was our Tweet-up, Jazz (@girl_vs_mmo) was there. She’d had the chance to play Guild Wars 2 and had gone to a panel on it as well. I’m not a fan of Guild Wars and have been turning my nose up at Guild Wars 2… but after hearing all about it, now I want to play! Ditto SW:TOR… @MMOGC had a chance to play that one, and now I’m excited about it, too. I think it might be more fun to listen to friends talk about a game than it is to test it your self.

We left PAX at 6, freshened up a bit then went out for a quick meal which took forever… really the eateries around the convention center were over-whelmed this weekend. We got back to the Tweet-up location right at 9 to find the bar we’d planned to have it in packed. We had to improvise and I was fretting about how lame the whole thing was turning out, but then everyone pitched in, we grabbed tables and scoured the lobby for chairs and pretty soon there we sat, a dozen gamers, most of whom only knew each other previously from twitter or reading blogs, having a few drinks and yammering on about the show and games and Star Wars and Star Trek and Munchkin and on and on… I had a great time (and remember, I can’t stand people) and I hope others did as well.

List of attendees of our first PAX East tweet-up: @Scopique, @adarel, @sera_brennan, @kylehorner, @girl_vs_mmo, @MMOGC, @Hawkinsa1, @_jwgoodson & of course @g33kg0dd3ss, plus some spouses/relatives/friends who aren’t on twitter. Thanks again to all of you for making the effort to fit this little sojourn into your packed PAX schedules!!

OK the clock just sprang forward an hour… I better get to bed. We’ve still got another day to get through!

PAX East 2011, Day 1

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I guess day 1 of PAX is over for me. I’m back in our hotel room, rolling around the idea of prowling the halls to see what late night PAX is like, but while the mind is willing the flesh is weak and the idea of putting my shoes back on…not appealing. 🙂

We didn’t get to do a lot today. We started late because we were watching coverage of the horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then it took longer than expected to get Lola into her DoggieHotel, and then we hit traffic on the way into Boston. We arrived about noon, just when the first panel I wanted to go to was starting (38 Studios showing off their new RPG).

Since it was too late to catch that, we grabbed some lunch at the temporary food court and then headed off to our next panel on dialog in gaming. The panel itself was ok, but I was disappointed that Emily Short didn’t make it. But I was more disappointed with the experience of the panel. The lines were awful last year but the show is in a much bigger venue this year. But it seems a much larger number of people came, and the lines, or at least that line, was awful once again. It isn’t the duration of them that bugs me, it’s the way they cram you together while you wait. They want the lines as compact as possible so they’re constantly urging you to move forward, and they stack the lines side by side. So I’m standing there with my nose in the hair of the person in front of me, and if the guy behind me gets an erection he’s going to have to buy me dinner, and I’m rubbing shoulders with the people on either side. It’s hot and claustrophobic and terribly uncomfortable and you’re gonna be standing like that for 30-60 minutes.

Last year, before they got the system dialed in, they’d just let you stand in line. People would just sit on the floor and play cards or video games or chat and it was fine. Towards the end of PAX East 10 they got the cramming system perfected and they rolled it out on day 1 of PAX East 11. Boo! I say!

We’d planned to go to another couple of panels today but I just couldn’t face that experience again. Instead we finished checking in (the hotel had stored our bags until 3 pm check in time) and got the laptops and stuff set up (internet: $12.95/day for the slow package) and then went for an early dinner in one of the pubs in the hotel (hamburger: $14)

Then we kicked around the exhibit hall for a while. I watched a lot of SW:TOR being played, peered over someone’s shoulders as they messed with a 3DS, snooped around Bethesda’s booth looking for new Skyrim info (nope, but lots of workstations running Brink and Hunted) and loitered around a few smaller or indie dev booths. Orcs Must Die looks real fun, and Slam Bolt Scrappers is pretty as hell but still confuses me.

I didn’t actually play anything. Waiting in line for half an hour to play a game demo for 15 minutes just isn’t me, really. I like to savor my first moments with a game and would rather just watch now and play when I have time to explore at my own speed.

PAX East 2011 Day 1 was feeling a bit melancholy. And then we hit the Rift party that Trion was throwing. Great shindig. Open bar, free buffet, hot apps being passed around by friendly waitstaff. And then we started meeting people. People we’ve only known from twitter & people we didn’t previously know and really should have. And we started talking about the show and the game and this and that and finally it clicked.

PAX isn’t about games. PAX is about gamers.

Now I can’t wait for tomorrow night’s TweetUp. Currently the plan is to meet at 9 pm at The City Bar which is right in the lobby of the Westin Waterfront. The City Bar itself is pretty small but essentially the entire Westin lobby is a bar of sorts, or at least it is this weekend. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding a spot to gather, have some drinks and put faces to names. We’re using the hash tag #paxeasttweetup11 or you can just follow me (@pasmith) or @Scopique and we’ll guide you to us.

If you’re at PAX East and have some time tomorrow evening, I hope you can stop by.

Rift: Relax people, they don’t stay dead

Posted on by Nimgimli

Just a quickie before I hit the sack before PAX.

So some Defiant ?? types were in Argent Glade tonight, nuking the NPCs. The locals (myself included) were spread too thin and too low level to do too much about that. So I just ignored them. Yeah, it was slightly annoying when they killed the tradeskill vendor that I need to buy supplies from, I’ll admit.

But a few people *seemed* to be really upset (and full disclosure they may have been RPing but if they were I can’t use my catchy title so I’ll assume they were genuinely mad). Like I said, they killed the tradeskill guy I needed to talk to but by the time I’d typed a scathing remark into chat, and before I could hit Return, he popped back into being. So I sheepishly erased my scathe and went back to tradeskilling.

So things I learned:

  • Townie NPCs repop really quickly.
  • You can chat between factions. I assumed that would be impossible based on games like DAoC and WoW. My bad.
  • If these guys had wanted to, they could’ve made a real nuisance of themselves by standing there and chain killing NPCs

I think they were just gathering up server firsts… they got one for each NPC they killed. Which tells me Trion approves of their behavior. And I do too. I’m looking forward to more open world PvP as I ‘grow up’ in Rift.

And I’m hoping Trion was clever enough to put in balance systems. Like if these guys had chain-killed NPCs and never were attacked by players, I’d love to see some high level guards spawn to run them off eventually. (I just worry about days when low level zones are pretty deserted and some player is trying to work on tradeskills and enemy players chain kill the only vendor that low level player can utilize, and he can’t find high level player characters to help.)

For the record I did try to spawn a Flare but I guess you can only do those on enemy wardstones. Damn!